For the First Time in More Than 20 Years, Copyrighted Works Will Enter the Public Domain

afloweroutofstone:

frankfurtschooldropout:

“‘The public domain has been frozen in time for 20 years, and we’re reaching the 20-year thaw,’ says Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. The release is unprecedented, and its impact on culture and creativity could be huge. We have never seen such a mass entry into the public domain in the digital age. The last one—in 1998, when 1922 slipped its copyright bond—predated Google. “We have shortchanged a generation,” said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. ‘The 20th century is largely missing from the internet.’”

“We can blame Mickey Mouse for the long wait. In 1998, Disney was one of the loudest in a choir of corporate voices advocating for longer copyright protections. At the time, all works published before January 1, 1978, were entitled to copyright protection for 75 years; all author’s works published on or after that date were under copyright for the lifetime of the creator, plus 50 years. Steamboat Willie, featuring Mickey Mouse’s first appearance on screen, in 1928, was set to enter the public domain in 2004. At the urging of Disney and others, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, named for the late singer, songwriter and California representative, adding 20 years to the copyright term. Mickey would be protected until 2024—and no copyrighted work would enter the public domain again until 2019, creating a bizarre 20-year hiatus between the release of works from 1922 and those from 1923.”

prokopetz:

I know folks mean well, but arguing that Article 13 will deprive media corporations of the free advertising furnished by Internet memes and fan media isn’t going to get you anywhere because that’s the entire point.

The whole idea of Article 13 – and the push toward copyright overreach more generally – is to make self-publishing (of all kinds, not just fan media) so onerous that only folks who operate under the auspices of corporate backers can afford to do it.

i.e., they’re trying to roll back to the pre-Internet status quo when a tiny handful of publishing corporations had absolute control over all non-local media distribution channels, and – unless the author was independently wealthy – media was permitted to reach a wide audience only with their explicit approval.

The mechanism is pretty straightforward: Article 13 and legislation like it would establish a presumption in law that the corporate claimant in any copyright dispute is correct, and place the onus upon the author as a private individual to prove otherwise. At the time of this writing, the average cost of bringing a copyright dispute to court is in the neighborhood of $200 000. What private individual has that kind of money?

It’s not just about fan media. This type of legislation would allow publishing corporations to claim that they own anything they please, and hosting providers would be obliged to block distribution of that content purely on the claimant’s say-so, unless and until the dispute is resolved in court – and unless you’ve got two hundred grand to burn, that resolution will never happen.

Of course, there’d be remedies short of going to court – like, say, signing on with a publishing company yourself, so that they can “protect” your intellectual property on your behalf. See where this is going?

Pointing out the potential for short-term harm to publishing corporations’ bottom line is a non-starter because no amount of loss of exposure could possibly outweigh the benefits to the publishing corps if the long game pays off.

ATTENTION

aegipan-omnicorn:

maddstarr:

This summer thanks to help from everyone, the European Parliament decided not to fast track Article 13 a copyright law banning fan culture and memes. But the fight is not over yet..

ON WEDNESDAY 12TH SEPTEMBER (aka Next Wednesday)

The Parliament will vote again.

CONTACT YOUR MPS, SIGN THE PETITION AGAIN, MAKE SOME NOISE.

To all my followers; please note I will be reblogging stuff like this until the decision is made on Wednesday, if Articles 11 and 13 are passed as law, my blog will likely be marked as copyright infringement. As well as this, the articles benefit major news companies and give them full power over what is broadcast – smaller ones will likely be suppressed due to a new payment that’s must be made in order to report on news events.

PLEASE HELP GET EVERYONES ATTENTION BY MAKING AWARENESS OF THIS

Signal boosting for EU peeps.

Wish I could sign those petitions. If you can, do it for all of us.

The future is here today: you can’t play Bach on Youtube because Sony says they own his compositions

mostlysignssomeportents:

James Rhodes, a pianist, performed a Bach composition for his Youtube channel, but it didn’t stay up – Youtube’s Content ID system pulled it down and accused him of copyright infringement
because Sony Music Global had claimed that they owned 47 seconds’ worth
of his personal performance of a song whose composer has been dead for
300 years.

This is a glimpse of the near future. In one week, the European Parliament will vote on a proposal to force all online services to implement Content ID-style censorship, but not just for videos – for audio, text, stills, code, everything.

Just last week, German music professor Ulrich Kaiser posted his research
on automated censorship of classical music, in which he found that it
was nearly impossible to post anything by composers like Bartok,
Schubert, Puccini and Wagner, because companies large and small have
fraudulently laid claim to their whole catalogs.

Europeans have one week to contact their MEPs to head off this catastrophe.

Stop what you’re doing and contact two friends in the EU right now and send them to Save Your Internet – before it’s too late.

https://boingboing.net/2018/09/05/mozart-bach-sorta-mach.html

European lawmaker writes post warning about dangers of automatic copyright filters, which is taken down by an automatic copyright filter

mostlysignssomeportents:

Julia Reda is the Member of the European Parliament who has led the fight against Article 13, a proposal to force all online services to create automatic filters that block anything claimed as a copyrighted work.

Reda has written copiously on the risks of such a system, with an
emphasis on the fact that these filters are error-prone and likely to
block material that doesn’t infringe copyright.

Guess what happened next!

Topple Track (a notoriously sloppy copyright enforcement bot used by the major entertainment companies) got one of Reda’s posts
on the indiscriminate untrustworthiness of copyright filters removed
from Google’s index by automatically making a false claim of copyright
infringement.

https://boingboing.net/2018/08/21/own-goal.html